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viernes, 15 de marzo de 2013

Dan Hammond explains why economists' assumptions about social life can't give us the complete picture of marriage.

On Economists and Marriage



While there is something noble in economists' assumption that social life is based on mutually beneficial exchange, rather than coercion and plunder, this fails to account for what philosophy, theology, and literature reveal to us about the true substance of marriage.
Frank Sheed once argued that sanity consists in seeing the world as it is--"seeing what is there is sanity, or the health of the intellect." Economists take pride in seeing what is there. They are inclined to a hardheaded empirical realism about human behavior.
For the purpose of explaining market prices, this inclination is scientifically healthy. For example, economists take actual offers to buy and sell as truer indicators of dollar value than responses to hypothetical survey questions. Show me how much of your time, talent, and treasure you devote to something, and this will show how much you really value it. Economists regard their discipline as the queen of the social sciences because economics has a core theoretical framework, demand and supply, and a ready source of empirical data in prices and quantities from market trades.

When economists successfully uncovered the regularities of market behavior, they began taking their market analysis to other domains of human activity, such as politics and government, religion, and even to marriage and the family. 

In these settings, the realities of buying and selling at actual prices in actual markets gave way to analysis of as-if exchanges at "shadow prices" in metaphorical markets.
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Read more: www.thepublicdiscourse.com

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